Friday, December 10, 2010

60. Aipac- lid Richard Forer onderzocht de feiten.

In green: the passage about Israel who creates Hamas, in cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the spring of 2009, I was a member of a group that put up a billboard criticizingIsrael's lethal use of force during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. A year later, thegroup received a letter from a college student - referred to as "J" below - askingit to remove the billboard. The student said that he had researched the Gazainvasion and had concluded that both sides were equally responsible for itsconsequences. He felt that the billboard unfairly placed the blame for all of thedestruction solely at the feet of Israel. I replied to the student with the followingletter, some of which contains passages from my forthcoming book.

Hi J,

Thank you for your letter. First, I assume you are Jewish. Is that correct? Before Iget into the specifics of your letter I want to talk about a few things you mightfind interesting. I do so because everyone involved in the Israel-Palestine issuehas the potential to change the world from an arena of Us against Them into oneof peace and respect. But that requires undeviating self-honesty, which leads tocompassion, clarity and understanding. Most people do not take up the challengeof looking deeply within for fear of what they might find. They revert to thesafety of their presumed identity and the beliefs and images that make up andreinforce their identity. Attachment to a limited or exclusive identity alwayscarries with it the consciousness of Us against Them. The consciousness of Usagainst Them requires that there be unending conflict.

Perhaps you have it within yourself to look beyond what you currently see as allsides of the issue. I hope so because the lives of those who suffer on either sideof the conflict depend upon people like you. Peace is only possible when we carefor people on both sides equally. We do not have to like the other but we have torecognize that he is just as entitled to self-determination as us, that he has thesame human needs for respect and dignity as do we. We also have to begin tounderstand and ask why the other acts as he does. Does his motivation arise in avacuum or does it arise in relationship to our own behaviour. Have we playedroles in inciting his behavior? Until we take responsibility for the parts we play inthe drama of human suffering and as it relates to the Israel-Palestine conflict,peace has no chance; and the people we claim to care about will continue tosuffer and die, now and into the bloody future, in Israel, in Palestine andthroughout the world. They will die and suffer because our true goal is not theirwellbeing; our true goal is to maintain our presumed identity; it is to confirm thebeliefs and images that we incorrectly associate with our personal and collectiveidentity.

As long as we believe in a world of Us against Them we will see a world of Usagainst Them. Our emotions, our attitudes toward others, the way we interpretevents, what we notice and what we don't notice will mirror our world view,thereby confirming and reinforcing it. In short, individually and collectively, wecreate the world we live in. Thus, the great struggle all of us must take on, if wetruly want peace and respect between peoples, is to transform our consciousnessfrom Us against Them to one of tolerance and understanding.

To be honest your letter can only fully be answered with a comprehensive look atthe history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The book I have completed would be agood reply but that is beyond the scope of our discussion for now. Obviously youare very passionate and concerned about this situation. With that in mind I haveincluded at the end of this letter a list of some well-researched books on thesubject. Most of these writers have come to similar conclusions. Most of them areJewish. Cypel and Hirst are famous journalists from France and Englandrespectively. Cypel lived in Israel for 10 years and his father was a Zionist leader.Ben-Ami, a historian and former minister of foreign affairs and internal security,was Barak's chief negotiator at Camp David. [Ilan] Pappe, [Avi] Shlaim, [Tom]Segev and [Benny] Morris are all famous Israeli historians and among the groupknown as "new" or "revisionist" historians because of their access to the primaryarchives and their refutation of common Zionist myths. [Tanya] Reinhart and[Baruch] Kimmerling were two of the most renowned and courageoussociologist/historians in Israeli academia. [Mary Elizabeth] King is an expert oncollective non-violent action who has worked with Martin Luther King (norelation) and Jimmy Carter. [Clayton] Swisher was a VIP security guard at theCamp David talks in 2000. He interviewed many of the participants. [Anna]Baltzer, an American, is one of the most compassionate people I have ever hadthe honour to meet. She is brilliant, fair and honest. She cares about Israelis aswell as Palestinians.

And even though he is particularly controversial, Norman Finkelstein, despite hisblunt critique of Israel's defenders, is included because of his genius andmeticulous research. You can watch him on YouTube. I researched a great deal ofthe claims he makes by reviewing his sources. In every case he checks outperfectly. I saw no distortion, obfuscation or deceit. Additionally, one cannotignore the sources he cites. Truthfully, if one wants to criticize Israel, deceit isunnecessary. The words and confessions of Israeli leaders are more than enough.

Again, before I respond to the points you make about Gaza, let me tell you alittle about me. I was born a few months before Israel declared its statehood.Both of my parents were first generation Americans. My mother lost 17 relativesin the Holocaust. My father and his family never discussed anything about thathorror. My younger brother is president of one of the largest Jewish congregationson the east coast. My identical twin brother is an ultra-Orthodox Jew who livedfor a few years in Israel. Both of his daughters are married with children and livein Jerusalem. Some of their friends are militant Jews from Hebron and othermessianic communities, who believe that the sixth commandment, which theytranslate as "Thou shalt not commit murder," cannot be violated by killing anyArab, since Arabs are inherently predisposed to want to murder Jews; and Arabsare not human anyway. One of my brother's sons recently served in the IDF [IsraelDefence Forces]. I have a friend who lives in Ma'ale Adumim, in occupied territoryoutside of Jerusalem. She was a member of Kach (Meir Kahane's group) for 15years. She now holds Palestinian-Israeli dialogue groups and prefers a one-statesolution.

I was extremely "pro-Israel" my entire lifetime. I was utterly supportive of Israel'sinvasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006. I joined AIPAC and donated to theJewish Federation. Midway through the war in Lebanon, after arguments withclose friends who were critical of Israel, I decided to actually engage myself in areal study of the Israel-Arab conflict. My purpose was to alleviate my sufferingand to find more historical arguments to refute the claims my friends weremaking. Up to that point in time I had only read Joan Peters's highly influentialbook From Time Immemorial, a book that I learned has been universallydebunked and called a "hoax", "phony", "worthless", "recycled Zionistpropaganda", "previously modified and discredited Zionist propaganda", etc. byscholars from Israel, Europe, the US and the Jewish World Congress. I had usedPeters's research to justify my claim that there never were a Palestinian people;that Israel had always treated the so-called Palestinians kindly and had alwaysbent over backwards for peace.

During my research that began in the midst of the Second Lebanon War I chose tostudy Jewish scholars only, knowing that if I studied the subject from theperspective of any Arab or Muslim scholar I would suspect bias. My study becamea full-time and daily practice to this very day. As mentioned above, many of thescholars I studied had access to the most primary of sources, among them theIsraeli state, IDF, Ben-Gurion, Haganah, Palmach and Central Zionist archives. Iread the arguments of many Israeli officials, including a number of heads of ShinBet (Israel's internal security agency) and I read numerous respected internationalpublications (none Arab), including the Jerusalem Post, Ha'aretz and YediotAhronoth. I also studied the websites of the Israeli ministries of defence, internalsecurity, foreign affairs and health as well as respected human rightsorganizations such as B'Tselem, HaMoked (Centre for the Defence of theindividual), Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, OCHA (the UN Office forthe Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), UNICEF, the International Red Cross,National Lawyers Guild, Goldstone report, etc., all of which (including the twoIsraeli NGOs) at one time I would have suspected of being anti-Semitic. I readfrom both sides of the divide, including Alan Dershowitz, Aaron David Miller,Dennis Ross, Shlomo Ben-Ami, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and more. If Iwasn't sure who a source was I checked it out. I discarded anyone whose claims Icould not verify through further research and I discarded anyone who appearedanti-Semitic and/or seemed to be promoting their own prejudices without, at thevery least, solid proof from reputable sources. I also randomly checked thesources of virtually all of the articles, books and publications I examined to makesure the author was not taking quotes out of context, was not distorting the realmessage his source was conveying or was not simply lying. All of the actual

historians checked out well; and the human rights organizations, independent ofeach other are of a very similar mind. I doubt there has ever been a more solidlydocumented conflict in world history than the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Other than Peters the one author who was clearly distorting history for his ownpurposes is Alan Dershowitz. Anybody can debunk The Case for Israel. At one timeDershowitz was someone I admired but his spiteful and slanderous participation inthe Israel-Palestine issue has only inflamed Zionists and given them apparentjustification for their unjustified verbal attacks against not only Palestinians buthonest and courageous scholars as well as Jimmy Carter, who is committed to afair peace between both sides and without whose help in brilliantly brokering theCamp David Accords Israel would not exist in its present form. Remember,Dershowitz is not a historian; he is an attorney and his book is written with themind of an attorney. He ignores and distorts evidence that could convict hisclient; and he obfuscates where obfuscation clouds any issue that could alsoconvict his client. Unlike historians who start out with a hypothesis and doresearch to confirm, modify or deny the hypothesis, and who allow the facts todetermine their conclusions, Dershowitz decides on the conclusions and thenresearches (or not) accordingly. To cite only two examples out of many, on page184 [of The Case for Israel] he quotes Raji Sourani:

Even Raji Sourani, the director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza and a strident critic of Israel, says that he remains "constantly amazed by the high standards of the legal system [sic]." [Dershowitz cites Greg Myre, "Trial of Palestinian leader focuses attention on Israeli courts," New York Times, 5 May 2003].

Here is the actual quote from the New York Times:

Despite his many frustrations with the Israeli courts, Mr Sourani says he remains "constantly amazed by the high standards of the legal system". "On many issues," he said, "when the courts are dealing with purely Israeli questions, like gay rights, I admire their rulings. But when it comes to the Palestinians, these same people seem to be totally schizophrenic." [emphases added]

On page 42 Dershowitz says the following without citing source material:

The developing clash between the Jews of Palestine, led by David Ben-Gurion, and the Muslims, led by the uncompromising Jew-hater, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was not over whether the Jews or Muslims would control all of Palestine... Instead, it was - realistically viewed - whether the remainder of Palestine was to be given exclusively to the Muslims of Palestine or whether it would be fairly divided between the Jews and the Muslims of Palestine, each of whom effectively controlled certain areas.

What is particularly egregious about this quote, which is nothing more thanDershowitz's own made-up version of history, is that his primary source, BennyMorris, shows that Ben-Gurion's intention was the opposite of what Dershowitzattempts to deceive his reader into believing. Dershowitz quotes Morris'sRighteous Victims 59 times in the first 83 pages of his book. He quotes Morris atotal of 87 times within the 244 pages of the book. Here is what Morris (who is aZionist and believes that Palestinians are "psychopaths" and "serial killers") says inRighteous Victims, p. 138:

[Weizmann and Ben-Gurion] saw partition as a stepping stone to further expansion and the eventual takeover of the whole of Palestine. [Ben-Gurion] wrote to his son, Amos: '[A] Jewish state in part [of Palestine] is not an end, but a beginning. Our possession is important not only for itself ... through this we increase our power, and every increase in power facilitates getting hold of the country in its entirety. Establishing a [small] state ... will serve as a very potent lever in our efforts to redeem the whole country.

The above passage by Ben-Gurion expresses a common intention that he and themajority of Zionists shared for more than a decade before 1948. Confirmation ofthis can be found in many books on the subject.

Even though I am going to disagree with you I appreciate the fact that you aredoing your own research. One bit of advice that I think is important for everyoneis: Do not believe a thing anyone tells you about this issue. Find out for yourselfthrough the most objective research possible, as I did and be sure to do it out ofa sense of integrity. Do not demean yourself by selectively researching thesubject in order to prove to yourself that what you believe is accurate. Otherwiseyou will never discover your role in the suffering of others, nor will you discover

how to alleviate that suffering. And you will never resolve your own anxiety andsuffering. As a Jew you will always be left with the dilemma of victimization: Whydoes the world not understand my people and why is the world anti-Semiticjuxtaposed against compelling evidence that is impossible for all but the willfullydeaf and blind to ignore.

J, all that I am going to say here can be found in the many sources I list above orin sources available in my forthcoming book. I cannot divulge these readilyavailable sources at this time because I want to protect the integrity of my book.I also want you to know that I have provided more than 20 Jewish supporters ofIsrael with evidence similar to what I provide in this letter. I have asked them toexamine my evidence and to read one book to either confirm or deny the beliefsthey take for granted. Not one has been willing to read a book. Not one waswilling to challenge his beliefs. All claim concern for their Jewish brethren, yetnone have compassion for the Palestinians. I try to impress upon them that aslong as people continue to distort the history of the Israel-Palestine problem andcharacter-assassinate the Palestinian people - as has been going on for over 60years - peace will not be possible. Their response is to ignore me or accuse me ofbeing anti-Israeli. Denying reality, perpetuating an illegal and brutal occupation,character-assassinating the people you need to make peace with is a road tomore suffering, not just for the weak but also for the strong. Acknowledging thetruth and working to restore integrity is indeed a road to peace. Who really caresabout Israel and who really cares more about holding onto false and unexaminedbeliefs?

You start your letter with the statement that "we must look at both thePalestinian side and the Israeli side". I agree but you have not really looked at thePalestinian side. Take, for example, the letter you quote from Tom Adam ofSderot. Yes, he has had to deal with fear of rocket attacks but why? Withoutcondoning these rocket attacks we have to ask: Why have Palestinian groupslaunched these rockets? Has Israel incited them? Is the launching of theseprimitive rockets the only way they know to let the world know that theirparents, grandparents and children are being oppressed from birth to death?What about Palestinian children, whose lives are at the mercy of the Israelimilitary? Many of these kids have seen their fathers beaten by Israeli soldiers,their mothers humiliated and called "whores", have seen violence committed by

Israeli soldiers or settlers on a regular basis, yearn for a glass of uncontaminateddrinking water, are malnourished, maimed, deaf, blind, paraplegic, amputees,have endured Israeli sonic booms that cause all kinds of trauma, includingbedwetting, nausea, miscarriages, nosebleeds, anxiety, muscle spasms,temporary loss of hearing, heart and breathing problems. These Palestinianchildren are the lucky ones because they are not dead, the victims of rockets,bullets, white phosphorus and Israel's common refusal to allow medical suppliesinto Gaza. Also, you should know that Israel fortified public buildings andconstructed shelters to protect its Jewish population in the line of rocket attacks.You should also know that Israel did nothing to protect its Palestinian-Israelicitizens in their villages in the line of these same attacks.

You say the Billion Coalition "depicts Israel as the perpetrator and sole cause ofthe atrocities committed during Operation Cast Lead". I do not agree that thecoalition depicts Israel as the "sole cause of the atrocities", the vast majority ofwhich were in fact perpetrated by Israel. Rather they see Israel as the primarycause. Israel, as military and civil and illegal occupier, whose force is thousandsof time more powerful than the Palestinians, is the party that has the power tomake peace. What is particularly counter-productive is Israel's refusal to abide byinternational conventions and laws, which are designed to bring about a degree ofcivility between peoples.

Speaking of peace, I will mention only one example of Israel's continual sabotage or ignoring of peace proposals since 1948. That is the 2002 Roadmap for Peace that the Palestinians accepted in full. Israel "accepted" but with 14 prerequisites.

Among them:

[C]essation of incitement against Israel, but the Roadmap cannot state that Israel must cease violence and incitement against the Palestinians." "The waiver of any right of return of refugees to Israel; No discussion of Israeli settlement in Judea, Samaria and Gaza or the status of the Palestinian Authority and its institutions in Jerusalem; No reference to the key provisions of UN Resolution 242.

Any objective research leads to the inescapable conclusion that Israel has never

wanted peace; what Israel has always wanted is more territory. Israel's greed hasnecessitated the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in order to grab theirterritory.

You may not be aware, for example, that Israel conspired with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 1987 to create Hamas. Israel also armed Hamas. It wanted an alternative to the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]. The first Intifada began in 1987. It was primarily nonviolent on the part of Palestinians (not Israelis). Israel arrested or deported most of the nonviolent leaders while allowing Sheikh [Ahmad] Yassin, Hamas's spiritual leader, to distribute anti- Jewish hate literature calling for the violent overthrow of the Zionist government. It is far easier for Israel to portray the Palestinians as psychotic killers in order to divert the world's attention from its strategy of land theft and ethnic cleansing and thereby deceive the world into believing the Israeli army is merely defending itself than it is to justify land theft and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians when their resistance is nonviolent.

You need to do a lot more research if you want to discover, as close as possible,the truth. Your research looks like it comes from either public Israeli governmentsources, which are notoriously unreliable, or Israeli apologists who have a recordof justifying virtually anything Israel does. You also need to more carefully reviewthe Goldstone report. Israel committed terrible atrocities against civilians. Justbecause Hamas is also guilty of terror (to a significantly less extent than Israel)does not exonerate Israel of anything.

Israel has a National Information Directorate whose purpose is to coordinate thevarious sectors of the government apparatus into disseminating self-servingmessages (propaganda) to the public. I do not trust the Israeli government topublicly admit to their crimes. To do so would hurt their image to Jewishsupporters around the world who still believe in Israel's "purity of arms" and itwould implicate its leaders in war crimes for which they could eventually beprosecuted. Israel has always lied about its actions. Its history of lies isastonishing. I prefer to rely on sources that have nothing to gain and everythingto lose with their admissions of honesty. Benny Morris:

For decades Ben-Gurion, and successive administrations after his, lied to the

Israeli public about the post-1948 peace overtures and about Arab interest in a deal. The Arab leaders (with the possible exception of [King] Abdullah [of Jordan]) were presented, one and all, as a recalcitrant collection of warmongers, hell-bent on Israel's destruction. The recent opening of the Israeli archives offers a far more complex picture.

Akiva Eldar:

Without lies, it would be impossible to talk about peace with the Palestinians for 36 years while at the same time seizing more and more Palestinian land. Without lies, it would be impossible to claim that there is no partner for the road map, while at the same time injecting more and more money into outposts that the road map calls for dismantling. Without lies, it would be impossible to promise "painful concessions" in exchange for peace, while at the same time terming people who concluded such an agreement "traitors".

Former Israeli Chief of Military Intelligence General Yehoshafat Harkabi:

We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should manoeuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise position. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism.

Moshe Dayan:

[The state of Israel] must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no - it must - invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge... And above all - let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space.

You say that the "fundamental truth is that this is a two-way conflict". ThePalestinians could end the conflict by lying down and allowing Jewish settlers,with the support of their government, to overrun them, allow them to take theremainder of their agricultural lands, their villages and their homes, and drivethem out of the country into generations of poverty and homelessness. Is that areal peace? The fundamental truth is that Zionism, and the lies perpetrated by itsfounders, leaders and supporters from the days of Theodore Herzl on, hasinitiated and perpetuated this conflict. If someone attacks you, tries to stealeverything you own, abuses and humiliates your children and then tells the worldthat you are a liar who never owned the land in the first place would you acceptthat?" I do not know any person or country in the world who would passivelyaccept the theft of their land. In 1948 Jews owned about 6 per cent of the land ofPalestine. They now control 78 per cent of the land outright, which both the PLOand Hamas have de facto accepted as irreversible. Additionally, Israel hasillegally seized or controls about half of the West Bank. And Israel maintains land,sea and air control over the Gaza Strip. In short, the Palestinians subsist on about10 per cent of their indigenous homeland.

Mostly Ashkenazi Jews fought the British and the Arabs for a Jewish nationalhome. Their connection to the land called Palestine was far less than theconnection Palestinians had and still have to that same land. Yet I know of noJewish supporter of Israel who does not applaud the acts of the Haganah, Irgunand even Stern Gang for their roles in establishing Israel. I know of no Jewishsupporter of Israel who resents the uprising of Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghettoagainst their Nazi oppressors. In order to dissociate Palestinian resistance fromJewish resistance Israel supporters have to make up myths to portray thePalestinians as not a real people, as inherently anti-Semitic, as murderous andhateful, as not the real owners of the land, as a psychotic society, etc., etc.These myths are designed to deceive all of us. They deprive Jews and others oftheir natural intelligence and compassion. Palestinian resistance, while mostlynonviolent, is similar to the resistance of any occupied people throughout history.

Israel did kill almost 400 children in Operation Cast Lead. I am not saying thatIsrael's leaders said "let's go kill Palestinian children" but there is no question thatIsrael's leaders knew perfectly well that hundreds of Palestinian children andother civilians would die. Gaza is, after all, the third most densely populatedplace on earth, with 50 per cent of its inhabitants less than 16 years of age. Gazahas been a closed military area since 1967. Its citizens have nowhere to go to flee

Israeli bombs and rockets. I suggest you look up Israel'sDahiya Doctrine(orstrategy), which is designed to punish a civilian society for the actions of itsleaders (a war crime). As General Gadi Eisenkot said after Lebanon:

We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases. This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized.

Israel's most eminent military strategist, Zeev Schiff, said: "the Israeli army hasalways struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously. the army ... hasnever distinguished civilian [from military] targets ... [but] purposely attackedcivilian targets." Former Chief of Staff Mordecai Gur, a moderate, admitted thatIsrael always targeted civilians (see [David] Hirst). Rafael Eitan, chief of staffduring Israel's destruction of Lebanese society in the early 1980s, was an extremehawk who served for years as Ariel Sharon's second-in-command. He wasresponsible for the murders of hundreds of Egyptian PoWs at the end of the SuezWar. He proposed that for every incident of stone throwing Israel should build 10settlements. He said "the only good Arab is a dead Arab". He was founder of theextreme right ultra-nationalist Tzomet party (Movement for Zionist Renewal).Later in life he admitted ordering his troops to brutalize prisoners and imposecollective punishment upon Palestinians (both war crimes). He said: "I don'tbelieve in peace, because if they had done to us what we did to them we'd neveragree to make peace." Think of the implications of that statement. Yitzhak Rabinadmitted that "ruling over another people has corrupted us".

Operation Cast Lead was not "a reaction due to the Islamic Resistance Movement".It was collective punishment designed to intimidate a people into rejectingHamas; and it was a re-establishment of the deterrent force Israel relinquished toa certain extent in Lebanon. Ephraim Halevy, former head of Mossad and formerNational Security Director, said: "If Israel's goal were to remove the threat ofrockets from the residents of southern Israel, opening the border crossings wouldhave ensured such quiet for a generation."

Yuval Diskin, head of Shin Bet, acknowledged that Hamas is willing to accept along-term ceasefire on the 1967 borders.

Amira Hass reported in Ha'aretz: "The Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, saidon Saturday his government was willing to accept a Palestinian state within the1967 borders."

Jimmy Carter:

But one of the things that they [Hamas] committed to me that was very significant, and they announced it publicly, by the way, to al-Jazeera and others, was that they would accept any agreement that's negotiated between the Israelis and the Palestinians if it's submitted to a referendum in the West Bank and Gaza, and the Palestinians approve it. That means they would accept Israel's right to exist if that's in the agreement and so forth.

Roger Cohen of the New York Times:

Henry Siegman, the president of the US/Middle East Project, whose chairman is [Brent] Scowcroft ... told me that he met recently with Khaled Meshal, the political director of Hamas in Damascus. Meshal told him, and put in writing, that although Hamas would not recognize Israel, it would remain in a Palestinian national unity government that reached a referendum-endorsed peace settlement with Israel.

Regarding Hamas's use of hospitals, the Goldstone report states: "The Mission didnot find any evidence to support the allegations that hospital facilities were usedby the Gaza authorities or by Palestinian armed groups to shield military activitiesand that ambulances were used to transport combatants or for other militarypurposes."

In 2006 Israel made a similar claim that Hezbollah embedded their forces withincivilian areas in order to attract Israeli firepower. That claim was debunked byHuman Rights Watch, which clarified that most of Hezbollah's rockets were"stored in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields andvalleys".

You are correct that "Eighty per cent of the weapons used were precision guided,and 99 per cent of all strikes hit their targets." Yes, these precision guidedrockets destroyed or killed civilians, whole neighbourhoods, minarets where therewas no room for any fighter to hide and launch rockets, and UN buildings.B'Tselem reported: "Whole families were killed; parents saw their children shotbefore their very eyes; relatives watched their loved ones bleed to death; and

entire neighbourhoods were obliterated."

A United Nations General Assembly report quoted the ICRC (InternationalCommittee of the Red Cross): "The Israeli military 'failed to meet its obligationunder international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.'Israel made no effort to allow civilians to escape the fighting."

The Goldstone report is particularly damning. Again, please read through it.Goldstone rejected the HRC's [UN Human Rights Council] request to investigatepossible war crimes by Israel until they altered the wording to include Hamas as apossible perpetrator. The Israeli government acknowledged his "record ofimpartiality". His findings are in line with the numerous human rights groups Imentioned earlier in the letter. IDF soldiers have testified to deliberately killingcivilians, just as they have testified to similar brutalities in Hebron. The evidenceis overwhelming. If Goldstone had not been head of the Mission there is a highlikelihood that the report would have been even more critical of Israel.

Goldstone, as any reasonable person knows, is not an anti-Semite. Eliyahu Yishaiwas deputy prime minister during Operation Cast Lead. At the beginning of theinvasion he urged the IDF to "bomb thousands of houses, to destroy Gaza". Ninemonths later, as minister of the interior, Yishai slandered Goldstone as an"abominable anti-Semite" for heading a mission that concluded that the IDF didexactly what Yishai wanted them to do. Yishai is not a reasonable person.

Israel's internal investigations were designed to cover up their atrocities. Chief ofStaff Gabi Ashkenaziis not going to implicate himself or other Israeli officials inpossible war crimes and crimes against humanity. Amnesty Internationalresponded to the IDF "internal investigation":

The information made public only refers to a handful of cases and lacks crucial details. It mostly repeats claims made by the army and the authorities many times since the early days of Operation "Cast Lead... It does not even attempt to explain the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths nor the massive destruction caused to civilian buildings in Gaza. [T]he army's claims appear to be more an attempt to shirk its responsibilities than a genuine process to establish the truth. Such an approach lacks credibility.

Regarding rocket and mortar fire, from 2000 through 2008 Palestinian groupslaunched 8,088 unsophisticated rockets and mortars against Israel. From 2001

through 2008 eighteen Israelis were killed as a result of these attacks. Contrastthose figures with the 7,700 sophisticated rockets that Israel launched againstGaza in nine months, between September 2005 and June 2006. From 2005-2007,1,290 Gazans, including 222 children, were killed as a result of these kinds ofattacks. Who is the perpetrator and who is the victim?

Your statement that "Israel warned the Palestinian people that election of Hamasto the head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) would only cause more conflict" is areflection of an authoritarian mentality that places one party in control over thelives of another. It is the same mentality that is at the root of this conflict.Hamas was elected in a fair election that the US pushed for. Who is Israel todecide for the Palestinians who their leaders should be? Hamas is not monolithic,is not particularly corrupt as is Fatah, and is not a collaborator with the Israeligovernment. That is why they were elected and that is why Israel wants themremoved. Hamas makes the continued dispossession of the Palestinian peoplemore difficult. What you call Israel's warning was actually a threat. Hamas hasrepeatedly stated its willingness to establish a long-term truce. Ephraim Halevyand American strategists said that Israel and the US have the ability to strengthenHamas's moderate wing and engage them in a peace process. But, as Moshe Dayanstates above, Israel is not interested in a peace process.

If you honestly are looking for the truth your study of Operation Cast Lead issimply not thorough or objective enough. With regard to the ceasefire, if youread the analysis of the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre at theIsrael Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Centre (IICC) you will learn that"The lull was sporadically violated by rocket and mortar shell fire, carried out byrogue terrorist organizations, in some instance in defiance of Hamas (especiallyby Fatah and Al-Qaeda supporters). Hamas was careful to maintain the ceasefire."

Israel never really adhered to the ceasefire. They only allowed the averagenumber of trucks entering Gaza to increase from 70 per day to 90, not the 500per day that crossed before Israel instituted its blockade. On 4 November 2008IDF troops entered Gaza and killed six or seven Hamas soldiers because they wereallegedly digging a tunnel for the purpose of kidnapping Israeli soldiers. Hamassaid its members had been digging the tunnel for defensive purposes. On 5November Israel sealed all crossing points into Gaza. Yossi Alpher, former Mossadofficial and former adviser to then Prime Minister Ehud Barak:

Palestinians in Gaza to behave the way we want them to, so why do it. I think

people really believed that, if you starved Gazans, they will get Hamas to stop the attacks. It's repeating a failed policy, mindlessly.

On 14 December a high-level Hamas delegation met with Egyptian Minister ofIntelligence Omar Suleiman who, as mediator, had helped negotiate the June toDecember ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Hamas offered to end all rocketattacks in return for Israel ending its raids into Gaza and re-opening the bordercrossings. Suleiman conveyed Hamas's proposal to Israeli authorities. On 19December, Robert Pastor, a senior adviser at the Carter Centre, met with KhaledMashaal, who made the same offer. The next day Pastor passed Mashaal's offer onto a "senior official" in the IDF, who told Pastor he would get back to him. Henever did. As for the Egyptian offer, it is unclear whether Israel ignored the offeror rejected it outright. At an Israeli cabinet meeting on 21 December, YuvalDiskin, said: "Make no mistake, Hamas is interested in maintaining the truce."Diskin said that if Israel ended the blockade, Hamas would restore the ceasefire.

If you've gotten this far, I can tell you the billboard you object to was taken downby Lamar Advertising on 28 April 2009. It was designed to provoke reaction from amostly apathetic public in the wake of a brutal invasion. Calls from AIPACsupporters influenced Lamar's decision. Rather than seeing themselves and Israelas victims, these AIPAC people would be far more effective if they took the timeto actually look at the evidence. None whom I have met have any intelligentknowledge of the actual history. For them, the childhood myths they were raisedwith supersede years of honest and objective research. Their attitude is identicalto fundamentalist Christians who believe non-Christians will go to hell for theirfailure to accept Jesus Christ into their lives. They claim to care about Israelisbut their continued support of a brutal occupation only demeans an entire peopleand perpetuates conflict for both sides of the issue. It also paints Judaism, onceknown for its commitment to ethics and justice, as a religion and culture ofhypocrisy and bigotry.

Please do not fall into the trap that so many who remain unconscious of theirparticipation in the suffering of others have fallen into. Please do not allowbigotry to influence you as it has influenced them. I urge you to avoid losing yourhumanity. Commit yourself to the truth. It is the only path that will free you ofyour own suffering and free others less fortunate than you of the sufferingimposed on them by others.

David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the MiddleEast

Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine ConflictNorman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and theAbuse of History

Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against the PalestiniansMary Elizabeth King, A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada andNonviolent Resistance

Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Tanya Reinhart, The Road Map To Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the HolocaustTom Segev, 1949: The First IsraelisAvi Shlaim, The Iron Wall

Clayton Swisher, The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story about theCollapse of the Middle East Peace Process

* Richard Forer is a former member of AIPAC. His identical twin brother is aprominent member of an Ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism. His younger brother isan attorney and President of one of the largest Reform synagogues on the Eastcoast. Forer is a practitioner of the Meir Schneider Self-Healing Method, aunique system of healing developed by an Israeli. His book, Breakthrough:Transforming Fear into Compassion - A New Perspective on the Israel-PalestineConflict will be available in the Fall. He can be reached atrich forer@yahoo.com.

About Me

'Mission statement'.
I am convinced that jewish individuals and groups have an enormous influence on the world. The MSM are, for almost all people, the only source of information, and these are largely controlled by jewish people.
So there is a huge under-reporting on jewish influence in the world.
I see it as my mission to try to close this gap. To quote Henry Ford: "Corral the 50 wealthiest jews and there will be no wars." `(Thomas Friedman wrote the same in Haaretz, about the war against Iraq! See yellow marked area, blog 573)
If that is true, my mission must be very beneficial to humanity.